The vertical archipelago is the model, named by anthropologist John V. Murra in 1972 from colonial records, of how Andean communities secured a full range of produce by holding scattered colonies across stacked ecological tiers. A single highland group might control coca and maize lands in warm valleys, tubers on the high puna and access to coastal or forest goods, linked by reciprocity rather than market trade. This vertical control gave communities self-sufficiency in a landscape of extreme altitudinal change. It describes a settlement logic organised by ecology and exchange instead of contiguous territory.
It reframes Andean urbanism and economy as a non-contiguous, ecologically distributed system, a major corrective to land-based, market-centred models. The concept remains foundational to understanding pre-Hispanic Andean spatial organisation.